The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The life of Oscar Wilde is so wearily familiar that we assume that there is nothing new to think or say about him. This book proves us wrong. Carlos Blacker – the central figure of J. Robert Maguire’s research for more than half a century – rates, at best, a bare mention in Wilde’s many
My editor told me to read this book and write this review. Six hundred words, he said. Just like the psychiatrist Dr. Quinn instructed Charlie, the protagonist of said book, to write one thousand words a day. Therapy apparently. The big reveal is exactly why Charlie needs therapy. The suspense is meant to keep you
Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the
In a week where the news has been filled with stories about a certain ‘strong woman’, Kate Chisholm has found another strong woman to write about. In this week’s radio column, she argues that the radio presenter Sue MacGregor managed to be the only female presenter on the Today programme without the need to deepen
Philip Hensher was one of Granta’s 20 under forty in 2003, so what does he make of the new list? Writing in this week’s Spectator, he says that there are a dozen competent to superb writers on the list but you can keep the rest. ‘When you look at the seven truly regrettable inclusions it
Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman’s recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven’t already. At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian
‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar difficulties in describing the nature of many of the shows that I produced at Mica Moca, a performance and exhibition venue in Berlin. Over the
Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion
Welsh miners, Basque child refugees (above), Tyneside shipbuilders, Paul Robeson: In the Shadow of Tyranny at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until 16 May) offers a compelling portrait of Britain in the mid-20th century, as seen by an émigrée communist Austrian Jew, who also happened to be a Soviet espionage operative. Edith Tudor-Hart, who had
You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen
In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing
Love Is All You Need is a romantic comedy that isn’t romantic or comic or much of anything. It stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widowed, all-work-no-play Englishman working in Denmark whose son is about to get married in Italy. Meanwhile, across town, the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a hairdresser who wears
Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera,
Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’.
‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’ I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who
A year before he died from emphysema in 1990, the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein agreed to be interviewed by the music journalist Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone. Dinner with Lenny (OUP, £16.99) is the transcription of their 12-hour conversation, in which Bernstein’s frenetic energy — ‘Byronic intensity’ is how Cott puts it — is as vividly
In this memoir Julia O’Faolain, author of seven distinguished novels and many short stories, asserts that she has nothing to say about the ‘inner Julia’, because being a writer she is more interested in observing other people. And, importantly, ‘I write because Seán and Eileen did.’ Some women stop identifying themselves as their parents’ daughter
We care because our name’s on it. This was the slogan used by Warburtons, the family-owned bakery company, to set itself apart from its rivals, most of which had impersonal names like Premier Foods or Allied Bakeries. Is this just a marketing ploy, or do people actually prefer to buy from a company that has
The literary magazine Granta had the bright idea, in 1983, of promoting 20 British novelists under 40 by announcing that they were the ‘best’ around. The first list was a resounding success, taking Granta well out of its habitual mode by featuring some very un-Granta names, like Adam Mars-Jones and A.N.Wilson. Of course, there were
The last time I heard Kipling read aloud was last week at a Scout Gang Show. It was the grand finale. Centre stage on a dais stood a serving soldier and noble looking ancient veteran. On either side, a group of Scouts, an organisation dear to Kipling’s heart, stood with outflung arms indicating these heroes,
Back in the 1960s, England was a bad disappointment to many West Indians. In the grey city streets with their scruffy, bay-fronted houses they looked for somewhere to live. Many were surprised to find themselves categorised as ‘coloured’. (ROOM TO LET: REGRET NO KOLORED.) In the Anglophone Caribbean, the term ‘coloured’ applied to people of
C.S. Lewis became a celebrity but remains a mysterious figure. Several biographies have been written, not to much avail, and now Alister McGrath, a professor of historical theology, has compiled a painstaking, systematic and ungrudging examination of his life and works. Despite all the trouble he has taken, his book lacks charm and does not
If you mixed Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin with a Joycean stream of consciousness from a female Ulysses in contemporary Athens, you’d be approaching the spirit of Ioanna Karystiani’s Back to Delphi. Viv is the mother of a notorious rapist and murderer, now locked up in Korydallos prison. Granted five days
Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary
The spy George Blake, doyen of traitors, turned 90 last year. Almost blind, he lives with his Russian wife outside Moscow on an SVR (KGB in old money) reservation. Much has changed since 1961 when he was sentenced to 42 years in British jails — the ideology he believed in discredited, the empire he spied
In May 1913 a British delegation visited the United States to discuss plans for celebrating 100 years of Anglo-American peace. At their final meeting in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the representatives of both sides had just agreed on a five-minute silence to be observed across the English-speaking world on 17 February 1915, when Professor Hugo
The man who christened Wisden ‘The Cricket Bible’ had little religion. Wisden is an unprepossessing sight: a 1,500 page tome surrounded by a flame-yellow dust jacket covered in mud brown lettering. The book’s content often matches its artless appearance; thousands of statistics and scorecards that read like the turgid genealogical passages of Genesis. Abraham begat
‘I had decided that I wished to write a novel about the immediate present – this was the summer of 1930 – and I had been speculating about the way people were acting and feeling,’ wrote Helen Hull of Heat Lightning in 1932. Heat Lightning follows the tumultuous Amy Norton as she returns temporarily to
How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December’s bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs
